Erwin Tenhumberg writes: I was happily surprised when I found out that ODF is already supported by the SAP List Viewer component (also known as the ABAP List Viewer or ALV), which is used many many times in all kinds of areas for displaying tabular data in a grid. The SAP List Viewer component allows exporting to ODF spreadsheet files in addition to Microsoft Excel files. This feature is available on systems with release numbers 6.40 and higher and works for all 3 members of the SAP GUI family including the SAP GUI for Java.

Free and open office productivity software have been developed to be on par with their proprietary cousins. The functionality and user interface are even similar. Free and open source programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and other types of office applications basically have their foundation in OpenOffice.org, a project spearheaded by Sun Microsystems. IBM and Google are also involved in this project to build a more solid standard for the associated programs.

Government's focus on open standards makes good business sense and will help to avoid dependency on commercial software vendors, says [South African] Department of Trade and Industry head of IT security Bob Jolliffe.

This article by Bryan Rasmussen gives a quick overview of how to design an OpenOffice form as an end-user, and provides the syntax for making an OpenOffice XForm match a required XML output format. The article assumes that readers have at least a simple knowledge of XML, XPath, and XML Schema. To follow along or use the downloadable code, you should have OpenOffice version 2.4 or higher installed.